They questioned him as if he were a small magistrate.
"Who killed him? Did you see their faces?" the policeman asked with the tired patience of a man who had seen too many stories turn into nothing.
Zaid was five. His answers, when they asked for them, would be short and clean as coins. He had watched the body on the road the way other children watched kites—familiar, precise, and without the expectation that anyone would mend what fell. He had no fear; what filled him was a small, steady curiosity. Who were they, why would they do it, why take a life when they left everything else untouched?
"Leave him alone," his mother snapped before he could speak. Her voice split the courtyard like an unexpected clap of rain. "He's just a kid. How can he tell you all these… these stupid things?"
The officers exchanged the small, private looks of their trade. One of them softened his tone and crouched to Zaid's height. "If you remember anything, don't hesitate to call us," he said, almost kindly.
They left without another question. Zaid watched them go—black shoes, briefcases, the way one of them drummed his fingers on the rickshaw as if the city itself were a thing to be tapped for answers. Even at five, Zaid could read faces. He could see the way some people were made to look helpful while their eyes simply catalogued exits. He could mask whatever he chose; being seen clearly was sometimes a weapon he kept sheathed.
That night, when the house fell into the soft thud of sleep, Zaid climbed the narrow stairs to the roof as he always did. The cool tiles smelled of dust and jasmine, and moonlight folded itself across the city like a worn shawl. He sat at the edge and spoke—part prayer, part question.
The dark thing answered.
It was not a voice so much as a presence, an impression of many things stitched together. "Humans are complex and dangerously stupid," it said. "They love and kill for very little. What you saw is only a glimpse. Even your own blood can betray you. Someone close to you is involved. You should figure out who."
Zaid had expected answers; instead he received accusation. He listened with the even face of someone learning arithmetic.
"What you told me I knew," he said simply. "I know how people are. Not everyone is cruel. I have seen people who want only to live quietly, to help others. I want to help them. I want to make sure no one else ends up like my uncle. With your help maybe I can. I can build something for people who deserve it—people like the old man I helped yesterday. People like my uncle. I have felt the screams. I have seen nightmares. I can help. I know."
The thing's reply was less a denial than a scalpel. "Do you understand the cost?" it said. "The cost of living like that. The cost of loneliness. You vow to save the world, but you cannot even help the little girl in your school."
For a heartbeat Zaid's chest tightened with recognition. There was a girl with scars—her face and arms mapped in pale, angry lines. He had noticed her, as he noticed most things, but he had never asked. He had watched the world from the margins and assumed watching was equivalent to action.
"You remember her, don't you?" the thing continued. "You know something is wrong with her, yet you did not speak. You are spoiled like the others—talking as if the world were in your palm. Reality slaps hard when your hands are tied."
Zaid stared at the sky and said nothing. The accusation landed, but it did not break him. Instead, his voice was a steady, unembellished thing. "Fine. I accept. I will help her. If I manage it, then you will help me. Help me find whoever killed my uncle."
"We will see," the thing said. It did not sound pleased or amused. It sounded like someone who kept accounts.
Dawn came with the house already arguing. Grandfather's voice rose first. "I told you I will not give you that shop for free."
"I am your eldest son now," his uncle shot back. "It's my right."
Voices braided into other voices—his aunt and grandmother in their own dispute—common things made sharp by hunger and habit. Zaid instructed his mother to stay upstairs and drink milk; he would go to school with Irsa and Saeed. They left in the rickshaw as they always did, the city folding open like a map.
At school, the sight of her made him walk toward her without thinking. The scarred girl moved like someone carrying an old sorrow. Other girls clustered at a distance, their laughter sharp as stones. They taunted and threw things; cruelty at that age was practice for later savageries.
Zaid stepped in beside her—close—closer than propriety required. The bullies stopped and worked out how to look away; it is easier to avoid the one who pretends to be unbothered. "Ignore them," Zaid told the scarred girl quietly. "They think this is funny. They don't know real things yet."
She gave him a small, bleak look. "You talk like you're grown-up," she said and ran to class.
At break, he searched the school grounds until a voice—soft and strange as a thread—led him to the back, where shuttered rooms and forgotten gardens lived. There he found her, alone on a low wall, drawing with a stub of pencil.
He looked over her shoulder. Her paper contained a single, terrible study: a shape of darkness that felt like the thing he heard at night. The lines were exact—the way the thing folded its head, the hollows that swallowed light. Zaid felt a tug at something in his chest, the sense that he'd been given a piece of a larger map.
"What are you drawing?" he asked.
She did not answer. Her eyes were wide. For a moment she looked like any other child with a crayon and a secret. Then her face shifted in a way that could not be explained by fear alone—her eyes flooded red as if tiny wounds had opened and blood trickled, not trickled but streaming down in thin, horrifying threads. Her mouth bled too; the air shrieked with a sound so raw Zaid tasted metal in his throat. She collapsed from the wall as if a marionette's strings had been cut.
Zaid stood there, knees unbent, the world tilting on a single hinge. The scream cut clean through the playground's ordinary noise and the sun. For a second the school dissolved into a smear of motion and color and a single, terrible knowledge: the thing on the roof was not only a lesson or a test. It had bled into reality.
People came running. Teachers. Girls. Saeed somewhere in the crowd, his face pale. Hands reached for the scarred girl; someone shouted for water. The small patch of wall where she had sat held only the scraps of paper and the dark, furious pencil strokes. The paper smelled faintly of iron.
Zaid wanted to step forward. He wanted to understand. He wanted, with a child's bluntness, to fix the leak. But the crowd created a ring; adults' bodies formed a second roof above the first. He could see the scarred girl's chest rise and fall. He could see the red dots on her face. He had never felt fear the way others did—but something tightened inside him like a lock.
And above that tightening, the thing's words replayed: You should start with the girl.
He did not understand yet whether he had failed or merely begun.